


Rebirth

by Moontyger



Category: Kingdoms of Amalur
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-01
Updated: 2012-05-01
Packaged: 2017-11-04 16:00:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/395609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moontyger/pseuds/Moontyger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Fae are creatures of stories, of songs sung many time over.  Recorded, their lives play out in endless unchanging loops.  Most of them are content with this existence.  This is the story of one who was not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebirth

Smell is always the first sense to return. She lies there, barely conscious and so without sensation that she might as well still be dead, and slowly, she realizes she smells damp – water and dust and things left wet for too long. Hearing is next – the scent of water is gradually accompanied by the sound of it as it drips from the holes in the roof to splash on the scattered stones of a castle she'd long since ceased bothering to repair. 

It's only well after that that she feels her body. It's the cold she feels first – it's always so very cold when she returns, despite the eternal summer outside her castle. She'd shiver if she were able to move, but she can't, and her muscles cramp from thwarted effort. It seems like forever before she finally opens her eyes – opens them, takes one look at her ruined castle, and begins to weep. Now that she's back, there's no way out. Love, rejection, pain, and finally defeat - she has to live it all over again.

After the despair comes the anger, as predictable as everything else in her life. In a rage, she smashes whatever she finds to hand, consumed by hatred of the House of Ballads. She hates them all, even Wencen, the King she knows she'll soon be forced to love to the point of madness. 

Why wouldn't she hate them? They never think of her, never pause to consider the awfulness of her existence. It must be easy, after all, for the rest of them to forever repeat the same actions – easier to live one's victories over and over instead of one's defeats. And when at last they tire, when the shine wears off and the endless cycle of victories at last becomes dull and suffocating, the members of the House of Ballads can find rest, leaving someone else to take over their name and their story. 

But for her, there is no successor. Who would wish to be the Maid of Windemere? There are no sycophants for her, no eager candidates vying to take her place. In all this time, for the centuries upon centuries that these Ballads have been re-enacted, there has only been one Maid of Windemere.

Over time, she has lost much. Once, she thinks, she had a name as well as a title, but it wasn't part of the song, so it fell away, abandoned like everything else in her life that the ballads hadn't felt worth remembering. They never mention a family, so she had none. They never mention her repairing her castle and so she doesn't. Never mention any desires beyond mischief and Wencen and, over time, she lost those, too. There's nothing left to desire, almost nothing left of her, everything individual worn away by the endless repetition.

But this time, it is different. This time, the Maid is approached by the Tuatha Deohn. She regards them in wonder – they are Fae and yet they are not. Fae are creatures of habit, of the eternal cycle of seasons, summer following winter until the end of time. They do not change; they do not alter as mortals do, yet it only takes one glance to see that these Fae have changed. She doesn't know what will become of them or what these alterations might mean, but she doesn't care.

For the first time, she feels something of her own again, something other than her first moments of despair or rage or emotions forced on her by the Ballads. She wants something again, wants it so badly that she can almost taste it, and it has nothing to do with Wencen.

The Maid of Windemere takes the prismere the Tuatha offer and wears it, uses it gladly, with a song of her own in her heart. She doesn't know yet if it is a song of victory or, at long last, her final funeral dirge. It doesn't matter. However this turns out, she knows one thing for certain: the chains of Fate have finally been broken. The future is no longer set in stone - for good or ill, it can be changed.

Free, trembling with emotions too large to name, she takes her first steps into the new world.


End file.
